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Gender, race and reputation

A panellist for our upcoming Reputation conference raised the fact with us yesterday that our opening panel for the day was made up exclusively of white males.

This was not a deliberate or premeditated decision. As I am chairing both the panel and the full day's event, I guess I felt there was at least an element of gender balance, if not diversity, to this particular session.

Liam Barrington-Bush felt strongly that there was something symbolic about opening the day with a session fronted by white blokes. He offered to step down from the panel to give us the opportunity to recruit another, less homogeneous speaker, which we're now in the process of doing.

The conversations we've had around this will make us look again at how we recruit speakers in future to ensure we give a hearing to a wider range of voices.

This is an issue we should and will address. We will make more effort to try and ensure our event speakers reflect the diversity of our society. We obviously fell short on this occasion and we're really sorry about that.

We'll keep you in touch with how we progress with this goal. In the meantime, we're always keen to widen our pool of interesting speakers doing great work that we can share with the sector. So if you do have any suggestions of how we can make more connections with communities who perhaps aren't part of our existing speaker pools, please do let us know.

Vicky became CEO of ACEVO, the charity and social leaders’ network, in January 2017, helping to empower our inspiring sector leaders to make the biggest difference they can to their beneficiaries, their organisation and to society. Vicky was previously CharityComms’ director for nearly seven years.